A 10,000-year-old mystery about what led to the extinction of one of the world’s last megafauna has been solved.
The woolly rhino was almost two meters tall and had a meter-long horn. But the creature, which roamed Eurasia for about 3.6 million years, was wiped out by human activity, according to new research from the University of Adelaide and the University of Copenhagen.
Looking back over 52,000 years of history, researchers used ancient DNA, fossils and new computer models with improved resolution that researchers “hadn’t previously thought possible” to track the species’ demise.
The team found that 30,000 years ago, low sustained hunting combined with cool temperatures forced the species to move south. These fragmented populations became isolated and vulnerable as the last remaining habitat deteriorated when the last ice age ended.
“As the Earth thawed and temperatures rose, woolly rhino populations were unable to colonize important new habitats that opened up in northern Eurasia, causing them to destabilize and crash, resulting in their extinction,” explains lead author Associate Professor Damien Fordham out.
The new research debunks a previous belief that humans played no role in the species’ extinction.
Related: Silent extinctions going unreported across Australia
More about the world’s ongoing extinction crisis
Have people learned anything from the extinction of the woolly rhino?
There are some species, such as the shaggy musk ox, which lived during the time of the woolly mammoth and survived until after the age of ice. It is believed that it survived due to reproductive cycles of boom and bust, allowing it to rebound after population collapses due to changing weather.
They are native to the Arctic and have continued to live in Northern Canada and Greenland. Alaska’s population was wiped out in the late 19th or early 20th century, but was later reintroduced.
Most of the 61 species of land-dwelling megaherbivores that existed in the late Pleistocene have now been exterminated – and only eight terrestrial animals weighing more than a ton remain.
Of these, five are rhinos, all of which are under constant threat from hunters. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an estimated half a million rhinos lived in Asia and Africa. By 1970 that number had dropped to just 70,000 and today it is less than 27,000.
And it only gets worse from there. In May, it was revealed that 13 poachers had boasted of slaughtering 26 critically endangered Javan rhinos in Indonesia – about a third of the remaining population.
As long as there is interest in the black market trade in illegal horn, which is used as an aphrodisiac in some Asian countries, the future of the rhino will not be secure. But researchers hope their research into the woolly rhino’s extinction will help prevent modern species from being wiped out by climate change and hunting.
“This insight is crucial for developing conservation strategies to protect currently threatened species, such as vulnerable rhinos in Africa and Asia. By studying past extinctions we can provide valuable lessons for protecting Earth’s remaining large animals,” said co-author Professor David Nogues-Bravo.
The study was published in the journal PNAS.
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